This is a story about referees...

Here's me travelling to work by boat during the tube strike. But why do you even have to go to work anyway? Why do we need the fancy towers of glass, steel and concrete? Why do we need to move millions of people away from their homes and into the cities every day? Why do we need to inflict untold agony on a huge proportion of humanity, just so we can keep some office chairs warm?

Imagine the global economy to be a game of football: the defenders are the police, army and healthcare professionals; the midfielders are the builders, farmers and fishermen; the attackers are the engineers and scientists. So, who's the referee?

The banks are the referee: they're the ones keeping score.

Banks are simply supposed to keep a tally - a balance - of who's winning the game. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. You can play football without a referee, but it's supposed to be a fairer game if you have somebody impartial to be in charge of the match, running it according to the rules and without cheating.

Why the hell would over 80% of our economy be given to the people keeping score?

If you think about it, most of what goes on at head office is administration. Administration never put food on the table or a roof over anybody's head. Administration is an unnecessary overhead, not a business in its own right.

For sure, administration is hard and complex, but that doesn't mean it's valuable. Just because you've been to business school and got your Masters in Business Administration (MBA) doesn't mean you know fuck all about building a profitable business that adds value to humanity. In fact, you probably got a bit confused and you started to think that administration is the same as business.

If you don't pay your taxes, the government will shut you down. If you don't follow the trading laws, your business is going to get big fines and may be forced to cease trading. However, following the regulations isn't actually the same as running a business.

It's easy to believe that because your business is well administered, your book-keeping is well done and your taxes are all paid, that you're doing a great job. In fact, that's utter horse-shit. What does your business actually do?

So much money is wasted building fancy head offices and filling them full of administrative drones. One office block I worked in actually had a worm farm in the basement in order to eat all the useless paper that was generated by the bean counters.

Do we really need all these people doing bullshit jobs? Do we really need all these records and processes? Is it really helping humanity? Is it making anybody happier?

Today, London was paralysed by a tube strike, but what's the fucking point of those miserable journeys into the office anyway? What got done today? What wouldn't get done if nobody turned up? Would the world end? Would people go hungry or not have a place to live?

"But what about money? What about mortgages?"

Fuck those things.

There are plenty of resources. There's plenty of land to build houses and grow food. There are plenty of rivers and reservoirs. There's plenty of wind and solar energy to be harvested. Fuck sitting at a desk shuffling paper around. Fuck kowtowing to some bean counters.

You've been mortgaged. The reason why you have to do a pointless bullshit job that adds no value to humanity, is because the natural world is being destroyed to create more phallic towers of concrete, full of administrative drones, to add some more fucking zeros onto the digital bank balance of a small-penised oligarch. Does that sound like a useful endeavour to you? Is that how you want to say you spent your life?

It maddens me that we have to get up early in the morning in the middle of winter and struggle to get to 'work' on overcrowded commuter trains, because our bullshit economy worships the referees; the bean counters. The banks are supposed to grease the wheels of commerce, not hoover up all the fucking wealth.

It disgusts me that the lawyers, accountants, bankers and other financial service leeches are wallowing in cash, doing precisely fuck all of any value, and mandating that humanity has to commute across the country twice a day in order to shuffle paper around a desk and move digital money in increasingly pointless complex ways.

In financial markets, we talk about 'naked' positions. That is to say, the trading of a financial product with no need to do so except to try and make a quick buck in the global casino. Futures contracts were invented so that a farmer could sell his corn before it was harvested, in order to buy a combine harvester, and so that the corn flake factory knew exactly what the cost of their raw materials would be. Futures contracts were NOT invented so that some wanker who flies a desk could make an easy buck without so much as breaking a sweat.

The whole fucking system has gone berserk. Money is supposed to be exchangeable for labour or scarce goods, but instead money's just casino chips that have no use outside the global financial markets. We're all paying a heavy human price for our financial services, accounting, legal and administrative world, where we've ended up toiling over ever-growing mountains of worthless paper, instead of trying to build a better life for ourselves and future generations.

What the fuck are we doing, when our most brilliant minds go off to work in head offices, doing administrative and accounting type jobs, writing legal contracts, banking and other kinds of referee type bullshit? What the fuck are we doing, running a football match with 22 referees and a kid with two left feet who can't kick a ball?

Referees don't make a football match. Head offices don't make an economy.

Tags: #capitalism #banking #economics